Layers and Transparencies: Creole Aesthetics as Visual Pedagogy for the Doctoral Journey (Poster 4)

• In Event: Nomadic Visual Inquiries: Explorations in Visual Methodologies Across Disciplines and Paradigms

Abstract

Purposes
Inspired by Guyotte (2017), Ohito (2020), and Wilson (2020), I became curious how artful inquiry might revive a hidden poetic to bring into focus the ways the Caribbean and Saint Lucia are still speaking (Hall, 1990).
Theoretical Framework
I began this current project to slow down and re-engage the body (Shahjahan, 2015). Through the creolized gaze, I seek to understand material intertextuality as ethnographic, biographical, diasporic, and connective in the project. To this end, I invite new cartographies of relation and reparative "lines of flight" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) through visualities of ineffable things, like, “experience” 'history" and "rest" as part of a decolonial project of “delinking” (Mignolo, 2007).
Methods
Guided by Rose's (2016) compositional interpretation and discursive analysis to "care-fully" (Ohito, 2020, p. 3) consider the artful product in its content and form, I attempt at a study that creolizes (Hall, 1990) “material previously been seen as quite unrelated” (Rose, 2016, p. 196). I use Google Drawing to place biographical and publicly sourced ethnographic images into conversation, layers, and relationality. I adjusted hues, doubled images, and faded them to expose meaningful textures and shadows. I played with transparency to make visual concepts of translucence, obscurity, phantasms, and diffusion. Cultural elements, such as regional fabrics and flora, became entangled with the more biographical aspects of my person. In my analysis, I am thinking with Guyotte's (2017) "art-based doings" and what art makes thinkable about the ways “art materials, images, texts, and other bodies'' connect (Guyotte, 2017, p. 55). Participants are also invited into artful relation (Glissant, 1997) with each piece.
Results
Through creation-research, I was able to achieve some visuality of creolization and relation (Hall, 1990, 2015; Shih & Lionnet, 2011; Glissant & Wing, 1997; Glissant, 2008) as I understand it. Four pedagogical invitations emerged among my findings where participants thought with the piece on the affective ground of forgetting/remembering, subject/object, disorientation/recognition and, labor/ease. The play of uncertainty and the unpredictability of participant responses through visual pedagogy also brought alive notions of Glissant’s (2008) creolization and relation as a beautiful chaos. For the purposes of the proposal, I include two images for the reviewer’s consideration (see Appendix).
Scholarly Significance
This project has significance to social science because arts-based research (ABR) remains resonant as a methodology that supports epistemological change. Responding to Glissant’s (1997) call for a poetics of relation, ABR invites onto-epistemological frameworks “that necessarily challenge and disrupt current unilateral and hegemonic paradigms that underlie social science research” (Gerber et al., 2020). In other words, we use art to turn to our knowings.

Author

• Danielle Charlemagne, University of Georgia